Sunday, March 18, 2018

To quote the one and only Katt Williams: "This shit right here N****r"!

"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history...You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you.”
That was a quote from a former director of the CIA, referring to a sitting American president.

History will not be kind to this president and his supporters.

This sad Andrew McCabe saga is just another example of the pettiness and vindictiveness of this president and those who support him. McCabe might or might not have committed a fireable offense, but the president of the United States had no business celebrating the man's demise and doing a victory lap on twitter.

Besides the obvious legal jeopardy he puts himself in, it just shows a lack of class and basic human decency to act in such a manner. He called the firing of a career public servant a "great day for democracy". Think about that for a minute.

This is why the left and the rest of the folks in the so called "resistance" are so energized. And I can guarantee you that come November it will manifest itself in ways that those on the right will not like.

Fortunately for us, this is not the end of this story. Mr. McCabe said that he took notes during all his meetings with this president, and he has given memos to Robert Mueller to prove it.

trump, of course, has declared that it is fake news.

"Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me. I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?"
We will see Mr. trump, we will see.

Saturday, March 17, 2018

Thursday, March 15, 2018

What kind of president brags about lying to the Prime Minister of one of our greatest allies?

What kind of president lies about how a major trading partner and ally tests foreign made cars to push his own agenda? (There is no such thing as a "bowling ball" test)
What kind of president claims that the candidate from an opposing party who just defeated the person he just stomped for, won because he ran his race in his image? (Hello republicans, Conor Lamb supports Obamacare, is pro union, hates the tax cuts, and supports Roe v Wade. All the spinning in the world will not change that.)
What kind of president has unprotected sex with a porn star just months after marrying his third wife, and tries to cover up the relationship with hidden payoffs?

What kind of president fails to condemn a major foreign power for trying to actively undermine the democracy of his country by waging cyber warfare?

Those were all rhetorical questions. We know who does all of these things: The current president of the United States.

Finally, for all of you trumpbots who think that his massive deregulation campaign and attack on government bureaucracies that try to enforce things such as building codes.

"A newly installed bridge touted as a feat of engineering collapsed on Florida International University's campus Thursday, killing at least four people.

Aerial footage showed first responders tending to victims at the scene, searching for people in the rubble and loading others on stretchers into ambulances. They were able to pull at least two people were trapped, officials said.

Firefighters have pulled out at least four deceased people from the rubble, according to Miami-Dade fire chief Dave Downey said at a Thursday evening press conference."

Monday, March 12, 2018

I really don't want to keep talking about this Stormy Daniels story, but the trump White House just can't seem to get their act together when it comes to what went on between trump and this "adult film actress".

Now we are hearing that there might actually be sex tapes. I said this on twitter, and I will repeat it here: If there are in fact sex tapes, there better be a warning about the graphic nature of the contents before airing it on cable and network television.

Anyway, Charles Blow has an interesting take on this issue.

"Dear America: Come on, you can’t be serious.

The ongoing saga over a president, a porn star and a payoff is so lewd and tawdry that it can’t simply be added to the ever-expanding list of horrible misbehaviors of a womanizing misogynist.

It’s not even the infidelity that most bothers me. I view that as an issue between spouses and with the other person involved. I contend that we on the outside never really know what understandings may exist in a marriage, unless the two parties within reveal it.

In this case, Melania knew exactly the kind of man she was getting.

When Donald first meets Melania, they are at a New York Fashion Week party to which Donald has been invited by the wealthy Italian businessman who brought Melania to America on a modeling contract and work visa. According to GQ, sometimes, to promote his models, the businessman “would send a few girls to an event and invite photographers, producers, and rich playboys.”

Trump is on a date with another woman that night. He is also in the process of divorcing Marla Maples, his second wife, with whom he had had an affair while still married to his first wife, Ivana Trump.

According to GQ, “He sent his companion to the bathroom so he could have a few minutes to chat up the model he’d noticed. But Melania knew of Trump’s reputation — which was immediately confirmed by the fact that he had come to the party with a date and was now asking for her number.”

By the way, just to underscore how vile this man is, in September 2004, Trump goes on Howard Stern, and while discussing with Stern how beautiful they both find Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Stern says, “Can I say this? A piece of ass.” Trump responds, “Yes.”

Six months after the tape is recorded, on March 20, 2006, Mr. and Mrs. Trump’s son Barron is born. (That means that Melania was pregnant when Trump was making his lewd remarks about assaulting other women.)

Four months after Barron is born, porn star Stephanie Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, alleged that she and Trump initiated a consensual, sexual relationship after meeting at a golf tournament.

Clifford alleges that the “intimate relationship” began in July 2006 and continued “well into the year 2007.”

Trump also goes on “The View” in 2006 and says of Ivanka: “She does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” His daughter! And remember, he is newly married to Melania, who will give birth to Barron just 14 days after his appearance on the show.

And through it all, Melania has remained. So, that’s their marriage. They clearly have some sort of understanding, some emotional elasticity — or financial dependency — that is beyond my comprehension.

So that part is what it is.

As for the present news, it is not clear to me if the money paid by Donald Trump’s personal attorney to Clifford, to prevent the disclosure of a sexual affair Clifford says she had with Trump, will be found in violation of federal campaign finance laws. Neither is it clear to me if the courts will allow Clifford to get out of her nondisclosure agreement.

Those are all legal issues. What matters most to me about this sordid tale is the way it fits into a pattern of behavior and a Trump worldview about women: that they are mere objects and opportunities, a reward owed to men of wealth, and that objections and protestations are invalid.

This is about the defamation of, silencing of, and shouting down of women.

At the very same time that the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have given voice to women, and led to men being held accountable, particularly in the private sector, Trump has almost single-handedly aided in the numbing of America’s sympathies for women who speak up about the sexual exploits, misdeeds and assaults of elected officials.

Yes, there have been some political resignations, but primarily among people who have confessed to their sins. But among the men like Trump who deny the accusations, little has been done. Indeed, Trump has made a habit of defending such men, using the forcefulness of their denials as proof of innocence. Trump himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by 19 women.

America, this is not about partisanship; this is about principle. Each of us must proclaim that this situation is over the line, that women matter, that their voices and their stories matter, that propriety, honor and character matter." [Source]

Sunday, March 11, 2018

The following excerpts are from some brilliant tweets I read earlier from Vox writer, David Roberts.

It sums up perfectly the current state of conservatism and trump's takeover of the right in America.

"All right, this controversy over conservative columnists in @nytopinion is bugging me. Everyone is dancing around the central point! (The same central point everyone dances around in *numerous* contemporary controversies.) So I'ma lay it out.

Here's the main point: the contemporary right-wing in the US has become, in Lionel Trilling's immortal words, a bundle of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." It's just a tangle of resentments & bigotries, driven by the erosion of white privilege.

There's always been that element, but for decades it was overlain by a class of DC conservatives who code switched, spoke the Very Serious language of ideas & policies. This is the conservatism that white moderate libs still imagine: an actual ideology, with arguments.

Trump's rise has shown that purported principles of conservative ideology meant virtually NOTHING to the conservative masses. Trump abandoned the Very Serious script & the RW base didn't care, at all. He voiced their anger & resentments. That's all the RW base is any more.

Trump has swerved this way and that on immigration, taxes, healthcare, guns ... and the base doesn't care. They follow him this way, they follow him that way. It is the resentment, the aggrieved sense of persecution, that they respond to. That's what US conservatism IS now.

So @nytopinion faces a dilemma. It claims to want to expose its readers to the perspectives of the conservative masses. It claims to want to connect liberals to the heartland. But there's a problem.

If NYT printed the *actual, real-life* sentiments of today's conservative masses, it would print a bunch of paranoid, Fox-generated fairy tales and belligerent expressions of xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and proud, anti-intellectual ignorance.

The people who work at NYT & the vast majority of its readers would find those sentiments ... what's the word? oh, yes ... deplorable. They would recoil. The truth of what's going on on the right today is worse than virtually anyone in the political mainstream acknowledges.

The NYT's commitment to "intellectual diversity" doesn't go THAT far -- not far enough to expose its readers to that reality. It is too invested in America's own Noble Savage myth, the idea that conservative Heartland Americans are more authentic & in touch w/ simple virtues.

So NYT needs "a voice from the right," but not a voice from the ACTUAL right (which is oriented around white resentment, not any discernible governing philosophy). They need a voice from the Conservatism of the Mind, the noble, principles-base conservatism they imagine.

That's what conservative columnists on mainstream opinion pages have been for years now: voices who will present conservatism as a coherent intellectual argument, what liberals desperately want it to be.

It is no coincidence that these guys - Gerson, Douthat, Brooks, Stephens - have little voice or influence inside actual conservatism, or that they're all anti-Trump (unlike 95+% of Republicans). They are anomalies, idiosyncrasies, not representative of anything broader.

And notice, even those invested in pretending that contemporary conservatism is a governing philosophy have thrown up their hands lately. Claim something for conservatism today & Trump could disavow it in a tweet tomorrow. It's become impossible to even maintain the pretense.

And so what do the mainstream "voices of conservatism" have left? Wan, half-ass whataboutism. "Sure Trump & the GOP are terrible but whatabout that time that one person on the left said that one bad thing?"

That explains why everyone on the right has suddenly fixated on Farrakhan. It explains why every conservative columnist is writing (again and again) about campus speech intolerance. It's not much, but it's *all they have left*. There's nowhere left to go, intellectually." [Read more here.]

Conservatives have always offered a cover for the racists and more crass folks in their movement. That uneasy political truce worked just fine until Obama came along and made them (the trumpbots) restless. After Obama they got tired of playing pretend, and so, much to the surprise of the intellectuals in their gang, they elected trump. Now it's their movement. And sadly for conservatives, there is no political place to call home.

Thursday, March 08, 2018

Tonight my racism chase takes me to Asheville, North Carolina. And for those of you who don't know, this is supposed to be one of the most progressive cities in the Tar Heel state.

"Federal authorities are investigating body camera footage from August that shows two white police officers Tasering and beating a black man whom they accused of jaywalking in Asheville, N.C.

The footage, obtained by The Citizen Times, has created an uproar in town. One of the officers has resigned, and the police chief has offered to follow suit.

“The city is in outrage,” Councilwoman Sheneika Smith said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “Facebook was flaming. It was on fire.” The beginning of the video, which was taken last year, shows Johnnie Jermaine Rush being approached by Verino Ruggiero, an officer in training, shortly after midnight on Aug. 25 at a street corner near a baseball stadium in Asheville, about 120 miles west of Charlotte.

“You didn’t use the crosswalk four times in a row,” Officer Ruggiero says in the video.

“All I’m trying to do is go home, man. I’m tired!” Mr. Rush says. “I just got off of work.”

“ I’ve got two options, I can either arrest you or write you a ticket,” Officer Ruggiero says.

The episode quickly escalates from there. Officer Chris Hickman, who was training Officer Ruggiero and wearing the body camera, orders Mr. Rush to put his hands behind his back. Mr. Rush runs, and the officers chase him, eventually tackling him to the ground.

During the arrest, Mr. Rush was shocked with a Taser, choked and beaten by Officer Hickman, according to police records.

At several points, while pinned to the ground, Mr. Rush cried, “I can’t breathe!”

The camera footage also shows Officer Hickman hitting Mr. Rush on the head over and over with a closed fist, and Mr. Rush crying out in pain as he is shocked with a Taser.

Mr. Rush could not be reached for comment.

When Councilwoman Smith first saw the video, she said she was “immediately disturbed.”

She recognized Mr. Rush, she said, from her work last year with the nonprofit Green Opportunities, a work force development organization that provides training programs to people in marginalized communities.

She described him as a hardworking man who was eager to learn and who had expressed an interest in construction and carpentry. “He was looking for opportunities to gain more skills so he could qualify for higher-paying jobs,” she said." [Source]

Hang on, people. It's only going to get rougher from here on out in trump's America.

Tuesday, March 06, 2018

Poor Donald, you just can't find good porn star help these days. Who knew that $130,000.00 wouldn't be enough to buy Stormy's silence? Then again, maybe Donald should have just signed on the dotted line.

"The "hush agreement," as it's called in the suit, refers to Trump throughout as David Dennison, and Clifford as Peggy Peterson. The side letter agreement reveals the true identities of the parties as Clifford and Trump.

Each document includes a blank where "DD" is supposed to sign, but neither blank is signed.
According to the lawsuit, Clifford and Trump had an intimate relationship that lasted from summer 2006 "well into the year 2007." The relationship allegedly included meetings in Lake Tahoe and at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

The 2016 hush agreement directed that $130,000 be paid into the trust account of Clifford's then-attorney. In return, Clifford was not to disclose any confidential information about Trump or his sexual partners to anyone beyond a short list of individuals she'd already told about the relationship, or share any texts or photos from Trump.

The suit alleges that Cohen has tried to keep Clifford from talking about the relationship as recently as Feb. 27, 2018.

"To be clear, the attempts to intimidate Ms. Clifford into silence and 'shut her up' in order to 'protect Mr. Trump' continue unabated," says the suit. "On or about February 27, 2018, Mr. Trump's attorney Mr. Cohen surreptitiously initiated a bogus arbitration proceeding against Ms. Clifford in Los Angeles." Binding arbitration is specified as a means of dispute resolution." [Source]

Get your popcorn out people, the next few days should be fun.

Finally, it has been leaked that trump's economic adviser, Gary Cohn, will be leaving the White House shortly. Apparently this tariff thing was just too much for the economist, and it was enough for him to part ways with his leader. Gary, you see, in economic parlance, is a globalist, not a protectionist. So off he will go. This is the same Gary Cohn, mind you, who threatened to quit after trump chose to side with white supremacist over every one else after Charlottesville. Apparently he had even drafted his resignation letter. But yet he stayed. Why? Because he wanted to see the tax cuts through.

Let's think about this for a minute. Mr. Cohn stays with trump after he sides with Nazis and white supremacist, but decides to leave because he doesn't like trump's trade policies.

That, my friends, tells you all you need to know about the morality of our American leaders.

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